Category: Contextual

Anna Mayer and Simona Dossi. Dec 8^th 2021

”After several initial conversations about our intersecting interests and shared questions, we determined it would be helpful to speak to people who have experienced firsthand an ember shower or storm. Our focus on embers is two fold. Embers are one of the ways in which fire enters built structures, so understanding how they move is important to designing homes that can better withstand fire (a primary concern of Simona’s current research). Also, embers are a very small instance of fire that can nevertheless have a huge impact on the severity of a wildfire. There are practicalities and poetics to embers, in particular how there are many intersecting factors that determine how they move through space. With our interviews we would like to hear from those who have observed these intersecting factors directly. ‘

I listened to an artist talk from Artist Anna Mayer and chemical engineer Simona Dossi, who worked together collaboratively.

Anna started the talk by introducing her work which she really began in her early 20s, initially she was much more interested in books, literature, book production, which then lead her into print making and then from there onto sculpture. She got a BA degree in literature and gender. In her early work she has an interest in pattern, such as camouflage and the history of craft. She found an interest in artists like Bridgette Riley, who also uses pattern and optical illusion art.

From her website, “Anna Mayer’s art practice is sculptural and social, with an emphasis on hand-built ceramics and another molten material: bronze. Her methodology emerges from site-specific analogue firing projects and critical engagement with pre- and post-petro culture. Mayer revels in the fact that ceramics historically has been used to create highly functional items as well as intensely symbolic objects. Her work is part of this lineage, with equal concern for the future and a dramatically shifting climate—ecological and political.”

Anna and Simona’s interests overlap when considering fire, its behaviours and how it can be controlled. For Anna these are considered when working in ceramics, which have to be heated in a very specific and controlled way to be strong and durable.

Simona, as a scientist, looks at fire safety in the aim to reduce damage to homes from wild fires. Hoe can we help existing structures withstand wild fires? How to Embers behave, which often are seen to be what ignites homes?

Anna put unfired ceramics out in the open in the path of wild fires to allow them to fire the pieces, and they would stay I the landscape until this happened. Each is about torso sides and has some text on it. She was critiquing other land art and wanted to make something of a modest scale. The quotes also relate to her criticism of land art. She said that many of these sculptures, she understands, may never be fired in her lifetime. 10 years into the project the wildfires in California, specifically the Woolsey Fire, fired 6 of her pieces. Eventually she was able to go and pull some out once the fire was contained. 2 are still buried by mud in the land scape, but she managed to pull 4 out.

My work similarly deals with changes I nature, as her work went on it began to be associated with climate change due to its nature. In some ways this relates to my work where life is regrowing from decayed things, in her case things are being destroyed (decayed?) by wildfires.

While this collaboration is distinctly different to the collaboration I did with one of my peers on the course, as this was between a scientist and an artist and has a different relationship, there are still similarities in the way 2 people come together to work on the piece. Our piece also included some scientific drawing from other artists which could relate to the collaboration with science.

Another artist I met at an event recently who also works in collaboration with scientists is Lucy Stevens, who is based in Leicester and collaborates with many experts in the natural world.

GardenShip and State: Jeff Thomas, Patrick Mahon, Mark Kasumovic

From this talk I was particularly interested in Mark Kasumovic, all of his photographs shown were taken on conservation grounds. The first photo he showed was taken on one such conservation ground, it shows the inside of a bird watching hut, but from the hut you can see the heavy industry surrounding the hut intended to view nature. Although many birds probably do visit this are he sees it as a symbol of a place to slowly watch the world exhaust itself or a place to discuss the current environmental crisis.

He also talks about how he moved to an area near where there was an apocalyptic scene shot for the opening sequence for blade runner, which was associated with society collapsing, maybe due to industrialisation.

He began being interested in working with scientists to look at how artists and scientists represent the world and hoe sometimes the methodologies can be quite similar but have different output. He began to be interested In the subtle, quiet representation of things collapsing and falling apart. This can be beautiful and something we are drawn to. I myself find myself drawn to these things and is the basis for my work.

He says that to be successful these images showing effects of climate change have to be subtle but they also have to be romantic in order to be interesting. He shows images of land and roads falling back into the sea. Even as a child he says he was thinking about how even if we become extinct as humans the planet will move on, it doesn’t matter, everything will be okay. He spent time walking around looking at he landscape for subtle clues of strange occurrences, such as sand dunes occurring on the conservation grounds which are surrounded by heavy industry.

Part of what began my work currently was thinking about the downfall of people and what would happen if we vanished, and nature began to take back over, and in some work lately I have been using a combination of decaying human made structures and the plants growing from their ruins. This is a similar combining of nature and human life hinting to our downfall that Mark uses in his photographs. His phones also appear very quiet in a similar way to my paintings, which is something I continue to take forward with my work.

https://www.beautifuldeath.co.uk/

Megaceros Hibernicus1983

“Cooke’s art often deals with issues of nature and culture, particularly with the formation and transformation of the environment over time. The skeleton of Megaceros Hibernicus, the largest deer of the species which flourished at the end of the last ice age, was recovered from the bog-lands of Ireland. For Cooke the elk represented a powerful symbol of pre-civilised consciousness. In Cooke’s painting the elk emerges from the gloomy bog-land with its enormous antlers treated like massive antennae transmitting, as it were, a message from the past. Yielded up by the bog, the elk demonstrates the process of perpetual interchange that occurs in the cycles of nature.”

This work by Cooke, while it deals with similar themes of nature and changes in enviroment, as well as contains similar animal and decay imagey, is much darker than my own current work. This work comes across quite grusome, the backgroud is very dark, there appears to be blood on the animal and its standing up like it has somehow come back to life and continued to move.

on the other hand, my work is much lighter, with smaller areas of darkness for contrast. It feelsquiet but not sad, the death balances or even overshaddowed by the colours used and plant growth.

we both deal in animals and decay, these elk are extinct, the animals in my work are usually dead. combining the live plants and snimal bones in my work also hints towards the exchange of life in nature and the cyles of life and decat which occurs.